British actress Emma Watson recently gave a truly inspiring UN speech - you can watch it here:

This fantastic speech got me thinking about 'feminism'; what it means, and what it REALLY means nowadays. I agree it seems some women don't want to refer to themselves as a feminist now as it'd already started to make a bad name for itself. I certainly don't like labelling myself as anything, especially something that may be construed as fighting against men. There are many inequalities out there for men which also need addressing, so to say I'm a feminist seems unfair to men's rights too. Emma is quite right to invite men to come forward, after all, the change mostly lies in their hands as to how the next generations will view women. But as women we need to be changing our views towards men too. Having 'feminists' and 'masculinists' only brings about more of a divide, even more of a 'fight' between the sexes. How about we stop 'fighting' and start 'supporting' the opposite sexes? Surely a hundred MALE feminists in a room is going to help more than a hundred female feminists? And vice-versa. So, hurrah for Emma Watson; invite the men in.Imagine this scenario. We finally discover one day that we are not alone in the universe (yes, this is still related to gender equality, go with it!), and our new alien friends (or foes depending on which Hollywood movie most likened to!) have some different reproductive organs. Now to us, they all look the same; big eyes and long fingers and all the usual stuff (apologies if the racial stereotyping of aliens offends anybody!) except for some have a red circle on their bellies and some have a green circle. We wouldn't treat either any differently because we don't have any clue of any preconceived ideas of what this might mean. They wouldn't treat us any differently either because they are not yet familiar with our mainstream media, amongst many other things; to them we all look the same too.So, simply the easy way to sort this out is if we all go and meet some aliens and start a new. Simple as that. But what happens a few years down the line when the red circle aliens have impregnated a load of female humans? There's pictures of them naked showing off their illicit circles. People are offended if a bit of circle is shown in a restaurant. Websites threaten to leak red circle exposure pictures of celebrities on the internet?We'll need to move to another planet. Maybe these ones will have purple squares. We'll start again.And then inevitably we'll all get hit by asteroids, or the universe will implode, or one of the Gods will come and tell us it was all a hoax and we all never really existed anyway, and then we'll all just go back to being a big mass of swirling gasses. Back to where we came from. All together, as one. All exactly the frickin' same.